Analysis Planning Process and Hypothesis Construction

UNIT F634

Potential Films for analysis:

• The Dark Knight Trilogy
• (500) Days Of Summer – How Narrator is used to explore Tom & Summer’s psyche
• Wish I Was Here
• Star Wars franchise
• The Perks Of Being A Wallflower
• Youth In Revolt
• Garden State
• Donnie Darko

Donnie Darko had the strongest ideas in the way of questions raised by the film that I could analyse, as well as being a film that I have some level of expertise and great enthusiasm for. After much drafting and feedback, I decided upon the following question:-

How do the technical elements within Donnie Darko create a style and atmosphere that disorientates the viewing experience?

I believe that this question allows me to analyse both the visual/audio/narrative elements and apply them to both the psyche of the characters, the director (in a pseudo form of auteurship), and any projection/effect this may have on the viewer. This gave me much to talk about, and; knowing the elements of the film, had many examples and scenes that I could raise in my analysis. Below is the list made as a preliminary plan to my analysis.

Potential points:

• The use of Frank and his costume – also mentioned in the motivational talk scene, unnerving
• The writing on Donnie’s arm
• The glowing eye of Frank – foreshadowing yet confusing at the time. Invisible walls?
• The “life-force” paths created by each person 48:30 – link back to quote from The Destructors passage in classroom scene (also links to flooding of school)
• Music within the film and the lyrics
• Intro song lyrics – Echo and the Bunny men
• “The Artifact and the Living”
• The voice of Frank
• The shot at 16:00 in, obscures himself from School
• Quotes such as “Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?” can throw the viewer off, but makes them think

These points helped me throughout as I could refer back to them should I need anything more to talk about or as a checklist for what I had written about. These points were done from memory, proving to myself that I knew the film and would be most confident in talking about these rather than researching and finding new arguments to answer my hypothesis question.
Essentially, this document was created to organise my ideas of my film of study for my Hypothesis. Not only did it allow me to note down films that I felt confident in writing about, but also allowed me to create a hypothesis question for my film of study and collect points from that film to answer that question.